Thou Shalt Not Make an Awful Movie

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The New York Sun

Hasn’t Winona Ryder paid her debt to society? Whatever her transgressions — serial-dating a string of second-tier rocker boyfriends, shoplifting on Rodeo Drive while high on painkillers — the 1990s über-starlet’s fall from marquee grace should be punishment enough. But, like so many of her otherwise thriving co-stars in David Wain’s overblown sketch comedy “The Ten,” Ms. Ryder seems to harbor an unfulfilled need for penance.

In this collegiate stoner’s answer to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Dekalog,” each of the Hebrew Bible’s Ten Commandments is used as fodder for a vignette meant to illustrate Biblical wisdom, mostly through absurdist toilet humor and deliberately outrageous scenarios that often only vaguely relate to any specific “thou shalt …” Now in her mid-30s but still credibly gamine-like, Ms. Ryder is prominently featured in the episode devoted to adultery, in which she falls hard for a ventriloquist’s dummy. She shacks up with the hunk of wood in a cheap motel room, then kidnaps the inanimate object as her personal boy toy, hyperventilating in an erotic frenzy the whole time.

Like much of “The Ten,” written by Mr. Wain and Ken Marino, his cohort from the cult comedy “Wet Hot American Summer” and MTV’s “The State,” the episode offers an actor respected for her taste in Oscar-caliber projects a chance to wallow in the vulgar muck of R-rated lampoonery. What’s being lampooned is not the stone tablets, however, but the reverse vanity of movie stars who yearn to not be taken seriously — for once, at least.

There’s Broadway idol Liev Schrieber as a competitive suburbanite who destroys his family when he starts trying to match his next-door neighbor’s irrational enthusiasm for purchasing CT Scan machines. Gretchen Mol, last seen as 1950s sexpot Bettie Page, plays a demure, virginal librarian whose vacation to Mexico lands her in bed with none other than Jesus Christ himself (Justin Theroux, gamely enlivening a romance novel cliché of the hotblooded, yet oddly philosophical, Latin lover). Oliver Platt is an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator hired to pretend he’s the long-absent father of two young black men (the set-up is far too convoluted to explain). And so on.

The problem is not the ridiculous series of premises, which are mostly variations on old jokes or stock situations. And it’s certainly not the cast, which also features Jessica Alba, Adam Brody, Janeane Garofalo, Ron Silver, and others in sinful situations. It’s simply that the sketches aren’t all that funny. And this is especially painful — bamboo-shoots-under-the-fingernail painful — when the writers think that pounding dirty jokes and unprintable verbal riffs into the ground is what will make a scene funnier. It’s dumb and dumberer, for sure, as when a narrator, accompanied by English subtitles, indulges in repeat recitation of the word “vagina” in a heavy fake Spanish accent.

If sex jokes don’t work, there also is that venerable standby, the gay joke. Anyone who didn’t get enough of those watching “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry,” run don’t walk to the multiplex! Mr. Wain serves up an episode about homosexual accommodation in a maximum security prison, during which the brilliantly original notion of nonconsensual sodomy as a source of rampant giggles is teased into a kind of aria. Winding down, the film tells the tale of a husband whose idea of honoring the Sabbath is to stay at home and invite the guys over to strip naked and groove to Roberta Flack records.

Now, see, that is funny. Even as a beer commercial, it would be funny. At least, it’s at the very beginning of the sequence. But the ideas never rise to anything. One extended gag about the movie’s host, played by the always amiable Paul Rudd, and his troubles pleasing the wife (a fiery, fine-boned Famke Janssen) has the most potential, and yields a zinger of a punch line (it involves Dianne Wiest of all people). But one or two winners out of 10 ain’t bad. It’s awful.

Come home, Ms. Ryder, all is forgiven!


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